


Catching Up

by LulaIsAKitten



Series: Octavia Street musings [5]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-26 18:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20747120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LulaIsAKitten/pseuds/LulaIsAKitten
Summary: Summer 1997





	Catching Up

**Author's Note:**

> Another piece filling in the Nick and Ilsa back story. I have written out of sequence, but the pieces sit in chronological order in the Octavia Street series, so I slot them into the appropriate place when I post.

Grinning, Nick reached out and shook Strike’s outstretched hand, and on impulse pulled his old friend into a brief hug. They’d not seen one another for almost two years, since Strike had signed up for the Army. The young men clapped each other on the back, and Nick squeezed Strike’s hand just a bit harder than normal. He’d also not seen his friend since the trial following the death of his mother.

“How’s it going, mate?”

Strike grinned his big grin. “Yeah, good. You?”

Nick nodded. “Let’s get some beers in and catch up properly.”

It was June, a glorious summer evening in a stretch of good weather. They’d chosen the pub specifically for its large beer garden. They bought two pints of beer and went and settled themselves at a table, making themselves at home. They had a lot of catching up to do.

“How’s the Army?”

“Yeah, good. The basic training was brutal, like you wouldn’t believe, but once you’ve survived that and got up to fitness, it’s just a case of maintaining it. And the police work side of it is interesting, that’s what I really wanted to do.”

“So do you get, like, proper cases to investigate?”

Strike fished his cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “Not on my own, not yet,” he said. “I’m kind of on a team. I do some of the more straightforward interviews, write up for the investigating officer, sit in on more complex stuff to observe. It kind of depends what comes up.” He lit a cigarette and sat back, enjoying the sun on his face. He’d learned, in the last couple of years, to take enjoyment from the moment and not think too far ahead. And certainly not back.

“How about you? How’s med school?”

“Yeah, good. Ramping up, we’re on the home stretch now. Final big exams next summer, and then I can actually call myself a doctor, though I’ll be on the lowest rung for a couple more years. And I’d have to do more years if I wanted to be a GP.”

“Do you?”

Nick shook his head. “Nah. I quite like the buzz of a hospital. And I want to really get my teeth into one discipline. I need to pick, start to steer my career in a specific direction. I don’t think I want to do surgery, or A&E.” He shrugged. “Or oncology. Something to do with the inner workings of the body, I reckon. But there’s lots of them, nephrology, hepatology, gastroenterology...”

“All sounds gross,” Strike said cheerfully.

“Ah, you very quickly get desensitised to all of that. If you can’t handle bodily fluids, you don’t get this far in medicine.” Nick laughed.

Nick fetched another round, and the conversation moved on to football. These days the rivalry between their teams was largely surpassed by a mutual loathing for Man U, who were winning everything and showing no signs of stopping. Arsenal weren’t doing too badly, but Spurs had suffered some heavy defeats this season and finished mid table. Nick grumbled about them for a while, and Strike grinned from the slightly superior position his team occupied, both knowing anything could change in a season or two.

Strike’s turn to fetch another round. He came back and plonked himself and two pints back down at the table. Nick grinned at him suddenly, and he blinked. “What?”

“I’ve missed this,” Nick said simply. “Missed you, mate. You kind of disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Strike grunted and looked down at his pint. “I know,” he replied. “Sorry.”

He sighed, lit another cigarette, blew the smoke across the sunlit pub garden with its scattered tables. “It was just all too much, you know? The trial, and Ted and Joan asking me every five minutes if I was all right and how I was coping, and Lucy with all the crying and the guilt. I just had to get away.”

“Hence the Army.”

“Hence the Army. Oxford was suffocating me. It’s so insular, and Charlotte—”

Nick raised an eyebrow. “What about her?”

Strike huffed a little, frustrated. “She was lovely, at first. But she didn’t get it, and she didn’t get why I was trying to—” He broke off and took another drag of his cigarette.

Nick paused, sensing he was stepping onto unstable ground, feeling his way. “Trying to make sure justice was done?”

Strike glared down at his pint. “I know I wasn’t living there any more,” he muttered, and Nick could see the unresolved anger tightening his jaw. “I have no way of knowing what really happened. But she’d never touched heroin, never. That was Whittaker’s thing. I only ever saw her smoke pot, and just occasionally the odd little try of something psychedelic like mushrooms at parties when we lived in communes, years ago. She would never have done anything harder, not with Switch to look after. It made no sense.”

Nick nodded slowly. “You’d know.” He’d known of his friend’s suspicions at the time, had sat in pubs just like this while Strike went over and over things, trying to make sense of it. It all came down to the bottom line - if it wasn’t accidental, then it was murder, and that needed a lot more proof than just the insistence of a family member who no longer lived with Leda that it was out of character for her to have injected heroin. Especially against the backdrop of her party-girl, groupie image and chaotic lifestyle.

“Doesn’t matter now anyway,” Strike said, grinding his cigarette out forcefully in the ashtray and immediately lighting another. “He got off. Defence argued that they were druggies together, that it was an accident. Nobody listened to a twenty-year-old student.”

There was a pause.

“So you’re okay?” Nick asked quietly.

Strike blew smoke sideways and considered. Was he okay? He generally dealt with that question by not thinking about it. Army routines were set, repetitive, comforting, each day laid out for him with very clear boundaries. It was much easier to focus on that, on his training, on being the best he could be, and not thinking about the past. It was two and a half years since his mother had died now, and he’d forged on through that time, one foot in front of the other, assuming that if he allowed enough time to elapse, things would get easier. He was still waiting.

“Mostly,” he said eventually, which was as near to the truth as he could get. He couldn’t bring himself to articulate the dreams, the pain that still blindsided him occasionally when he wasn’t expecting it, the nagging sense of guilt that he’d left the country and left Lucy and Joan and Ted because he couldn’t deal with their pain on top of his own.

Unexpectedly, Nick slid a hand across the table and touched his arm, withdrawing again almost as soon as he’d made the gesture.

“I’m here if you ever want to talk.”

“I know. Thanks.” Short words were suddenly all he could manage. He swallowed hard and busied himself stubbing his cigarette out to fill the pause.

“And Switch?” Nick ventured.

“Whittaker’s grandparents.”

“So you...don’t see him?”

“Nope.” Strike’s syllables were short, clipped. This avenue of the discussion was a cul-de-sac and they had reached the end.

“How’s Lucy?”

Safer territory. Strike relaxed a little, a fond smile creeping across his face. “Yeah, she’s good. Well, she’s going out with this idiot, but hopefully that won’t last.”

Nick laughed. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Ugh. He’s just so sure of himself, got an answer for everything. Comes from a nice, middle-class family, probably the apple of his mummy’s eye. He’s on cruise control for a house in the suburbs, a management position and a company Audi, two-point-four kids. Dull and opinionated. Lucy worships him.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what she wants.”

Strike nodded. “Maybe. Well, if she does, Greg is perfect for her. But she’s so young to be settling down.”

“And Charlotte?”

Strike grinned. “Yeah, we’re good. She’s out with her sister tonight.”

“She doesn’t mind you being in the Army?”

“She doesn’t love me being away so much, still periodically trying to get me to join her dad’s company and settle in London. I keep telling her it’s not me, but—”

Quiet settled over the table again, comfortable, companionable. “Another?” Nick asked, waving at their almost empty glasses, and Strike nodded, grinning. “One of those evenings?”

Nick laughed, mellow with three pints down him already. “Why not? You’re on leave, I’ve got tomorrow off.”

Strike nodded, and Nick headed for the bar again. He sat back and watched his friend make his way steadily through the groups of drinkers. They’d had many such nights over the years. He’d missed this too, the easy friendship they shared. It was time to reconnect with the world and his old friends, he decided.

When Nick returned, Strike had also decided to turn the conversational tables. “So, what’s new with you?”

Nick shrugged. “Not much. Working hard, lots of study, hospital placements. No time for much else.”

“Girlfriend?”

Nick shrugged. “No-one serious.”

“But there is someone?”

“Yeah, sort of. Her name’s Sarah. We’ve been seeing each other for a few months, but it’s kind of casual.”

“Well, it’s something. I thought you were Mr Love-’em-and-leave-’em these days.”

Nick chuckled, not entirely proud of himself, remembering. After he’d ended his relationship with Ilsa, he’d buried himself in his studies, determined to make the sacrifice worth it, and had come out near the top of his first year, largely ignoring all the freshers’ parties and first-year antics. Medicine had been his solace, the reason he had let Ilsa go, and had helped him to ignore how much he missed her, the nagging doubt that he had done the right thing, the constant temptation to get in touch with her. The barriers of time and geography to them being together still existed, and he couldn’t simply wish them away. Gradually the initial ache of missing her had eased.

Finally the following summer, he’d surfaced enough to notice that other women existed. The first one was called Sophie. She was tall and dark, totally different to Ilsa, and had been flirting inexpertly with him for some time. In the student union bar one night, something in him had suddenly thought, _why not? _and he’d bought her a drink and accepted the invitation back to her dorm room. They’d had frankly mediocre sex; she’d laid there, welcoming but passive, and he’d been unable to stop himself comparing the experience to Ilsa’s enthusiastic participation, and finding it lacking in the comparison. Inordinately disappointed, he’d dressed and left while she slept, creeping back to his student block at two o’clock in the morning, unwilling to submit to breakfast and hand-holding, and proceeded to avoid her for the next month, feeling guilty and enduring accusing glares from her friends but having no desire whatsoever to repeat the encounter.

It had been a couple more months before he summoned any interest in further hook-ups, and a lot longer than that before he felt enough interest in any girl to see her more than once. It had taken a fierce blonde (who reminded him a little of Ilsa) throwing a drink in his face and telling him she should have known better for him to realise that he was gaining a bit of a reputation for being a bastard. After that he had half-heartedly dated a fellow medic for a while, but she too had ended up angry with him, frustrated that he wouldn’t “connect”, as she insisted on calling it. She’d dumped him unceremoniously and he’d felt nothing but relief that he hadn’t had to be the one to end the relationship, and a vague sense of guilt that he hadn’t had more to offer her.

His determination to keep his distance had been, with hindsight, a result of skewed logic. He’d somehow felt that, having decided that he was going to be too busy focusing on medicine to continue his relationship with Ilsa, it would be disloyal to her to have any girlfriend, even a local one, although it was the long-distance relationship and all the travelling that he hadn’t wanted to subject Ilsa to. So he’d told himself he was too busy for anything more than casual hook-ups and had focused on his work. Letting Ilsa go had been the right decision. To think otherwise would have meant that ending their relationship had been a mistake, a thought he could not bear to allow headroom.

Now he had finally formed something of a connection with Sarah, a girl from another university he’d met a few months ago, a friend of someone on his course. She lived quite a distance away, a trek across London. She was nice enough, and the sex was decent enough, but he was in no danger of feeling anything lasting for her.

He dragged himself back to the moment. Strike was watching him, amused.

“Well, you know,” Nick shrugged. “One-night stands get a bit old.”

Strike snorted. “Since when?”

Nick grinned. “Well, you can’t exactly be having many these days, you’re all loved up.”

Strike shrugged.

“Wait. Are you?” A wicked smirk stole across Nick’s face.

Strike looked away. “Charlotte told me last time I was posted abroad that I needn’t think she was going to wait around for me to get back. So I considered myself free while I was out there. What’s sauce for the goose, right?”

Nick roared with laughter. “What a...weirdly apt analogy. And did you?”

Strike shrugged. He’d had one night the very evening they’d landed, having been put up in a local hotel before the long drive out to the base next day. There was a “last night of freedom” vibe as the young squaddies had hit the local town and proceeded to ignore all their commanding officers’ warnings about conduct and behaviour. Strike had kept slightly to one side of the rowdiest behaviour, and had very quickly attracted the eye of a young blonde woman who was with a rolling news station, in charge of sound and editing (he’d had to make some polite conversation at least). But their extended evening had left him feeling somewhat hollow and disloyal to Charlotte, and he’d not tried again.

Nick grinned. “Bet you got more action than Charlotte did.”

Strike shrugged again, a smirk pulling at his own mouth. “We don’t discuss it. She alternates between swearing she was faithful and insinuating she had strings of men lined up. She likes to keep me guessing.” She’d flung herself into his arms when they met up again, though. His ego preferred to believe she’d waited.

Nick shook his head. “I will never understand you two.”

“Me neither, but it’s not boring!”

Nick laughed again.

“So what’s this Sarah like?”

“Cute. Redhead. Funny. Doing fine art at Brunel. I don’t see her a huge amount, but we are exclusive. Well, I am and I assume she is.”

Strike smiled. “Sounds good.”

“Yeah...” Nick tailed off. It did sound good, but it had never felt like anything more than a casual dalliance, even though they had drifted along for months now. He sometimes wondered if he was capable of feeling what he’d felt for Ilsa again. He told himself that it had been young love, first love, that he was placing unrealistic expectations on himself that he would experience that level of caring for someone again, but surely there had to be more than this, than what he felt for Sarah.

“You don’t sound sure.”

Nick gave himself a mental shake. “It’ll do for now. Concentrating on uni is the main thing. After next year’s exams I shall be an actual doctor, just got to train for my speciality then.”

Strike nodded, and the evening moved on again. They discussed mutual friends from school, who had seen whom and how they were doing. Nick asked after Dave Polworth, an old friend of Strike’s from Cornwall, and Strike grinned and said that no, he still hadn’t lived down the shark attack and was still known as Chum. He was living in Bristol now.

They were on fifth pints by this stage, well into the stage of the evening where mellow relaxation becomes adventurous, conspiratorial or melancholy depending on the prevailing mood. His brain snagging on thoughts of Cornwall, Nick suddenly asked,

“And how’s Ilsa?”

Looking down at his pint with studied nonchalance, he missed Strike’s slight eye roll.

“Yeah, she’s good. Graduated, did well I think, though you know she won’t blow her own trumpet. She’s down here in London now, starting at a law firm. I’m seeing her next week. I’ve hired a car to go down to Cornwall for the weekend and she’s going to come with me, road trip.”

Nick smiled, ignoring the conflicting feelings this raised in him. Ilsa was nearby now. In the same city. What if—? But it was too late. All that was history now. He hadn’t seen her in four years. She’d have moved on, probably didn’t even think about him any more.

Still, the thought of Strike and Ilsa on a road trip gave him a pang of— what? Not jealousy, he knew that wasn’t what they had together. Nostalgia, maybe? The three of them had got along so well together. “Sounds fab.”

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.”

There was a slight pause. Strike narrowed his eyes, gazing thoughtfully at his friend. Sudden curiosity, loosened by alcohol, won out. “Why did you finish it?”

“What?” Startled, Nick went on the defensive.

“With Ilsa. I always wondered.”

Nick looked down at his pint and said nothing.

“I reckon you still think about her.”

Nick darted him a glance, flushed a little and looked away. “I don’t. I was making conversation.”

Strike snorted. Nick scowled.

“So why did you finish it?”

Nick sighed and brandished a slightly tipsy arm, waving the question away and almost knocking the remainder of his pint over in the process. “Wouldn’t have worked. Distance, time, money. It’s done now.”

Strike looked at him shrewdly. “Do you regret it?”

Nick’s jaw set, determined. “No. I did the right thing.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I said okay.”

There was a small, tight silence.

“Can we talk about something else?”

Strike grinned. “Let’s talk about whisky.”

Nick relaxed a little. “That’s a good idea.”

Strike clapped him on the back. “Come on. Let’s go and see what they’ve got behind the bar.”

The two young men stood, picked up their empty pint glasses and headed into the pub in the gathering gloom.


End file.
